My Favorite Reads of 2016

I love reading Best Of the Year lists even if I don’t always agree with what they’ve picked. After all, a really great list might introduce me to some awesome book, album or movie that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Even a list full of willfully contrarian selections has some entertainment value. The worst thing a year-end list can do is be boring and predictable.

Of course, reading dozens of year-end lists is completely different from sitting down and trying to write your own. Writing an objectively comprehensive list requires an exhaustive knowledge of your chosen field of pop culture. That level of knowledge isn’t really possible unless you’re an obsessive or write for a living, and even then there’s only so much time in the day.

In my case, it doesn’t help that I’m rarely current on pop culture. My library of unread books is so deep at this point that I’ll never catch up unless I invent a way to freeze time and/or live forever.

That means it makes more sense for me to write about the books that I loved reading in 2016 rather than focusing on ones released this year. Of course, it turns out that a lot of my favorite reads were actually recent releases.

	All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. Anders, the former editor of io9, made her debut as a novelist with this strange, far-reaching story about the complicated romance between an inventor and a witch. Touching, hilarious and weird. By the end of this book, I just wanted those two crazy kids to survive the apocalypse and work things out.
	Bone Gap by Laura Ruby. Bone Gap is lyrically beautiful and full of just the right hints of gothic atmosphere and menace. A teenaged boy living in a small town deals with the aftermath of a beloved young woman’s mysterious disappearance, only to discover that something far stranger may have happened.
	Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is one of those classics that everyone says you should read, so I decided to finally take a crack at it this year and listened to the audiobook. Turns out I really loved the story, and especially enjoyed the ever-ratcheting tension as the main character tries to live with his terrible actions.
	Glow by Ned Beauman. I enjoyed the hell out of Beauman’s earlier novel, The Teleportation Accident, but the two books have very different tones. Glow is a paranoid conspiracy thriller populated with druggies and people living at the fringes of society. The occasional surrealist touches paired with the relaxed pace and laugh-out-loud humor made for a highly entertaining read.
	The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. This one came out of nowhere and grabbed me by the throat. It’s dark, hilarious, and full of wild narrative misdirection. It requires a little patience in the early chapters, but pays huge dividends if you stick around for the ride. I want to walk up to people on the street and insist that they read this unsung bizarro masterpiece.
	Paper Girls, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Curtis and Matt Wilson. Paper Girls hits the same sweet spot of surrealism, horror and nostalgia that Stranger Things exploited so masterfully, but even in this first volume, it seems clear that BKV and friends are shooting for something much more subversive. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on by the end of the first volume, but I was definitely hooked.
	Rachel Rising, Volume 1 & 2 by Terry Moore. I bought the complete Rachel Rising in a sale on Comixology, and I’m definitely glad that I did. Terry Moore’s story of a small-town girl who is mysteriously resurrected after being murdered starts off small and then slowly builds to something horrifying and apocalyptic. I’ve only read the first two volumes, but I love the gothic tone and Moore’s way with dialogue and characterization.
	Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley. O’Malley’s first book in this series, The Rook, reads like The Bourne Identity by way of Terry Pratchett, and I loved it. Stiletto manages to live up to that initial greatness even though it changes much of the formula; instead of focusing on the misadventures of amnesiac Myfawnwy Thomas, O’Malley introduces two new characters and turns it into an ensemble piece. It took a little while before I warmed up to these changes, but I ended up loving the book overall.
	The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. This book is billed as a short story collection, but it’s really a stealthy patchwork novel about loosely connected characters living in and around Chechnya. Each story shifts styles and perspectives, slowly building into a whole that is laugh-out-loud funny and full of sharply drawn characters who are simultaneously comical, ruthless, tragic and sympathetic.
	The Unnoticeables by Robert Brockway. I literally picked up this book on a whim and read it because of its awesome cover design and blurb. Luckily, those didn’t steer me wrong. The Unnoticeables is gruesome, funny, and occasionally flat-out terrifying. It’s both a Hollywood satire and an apocalyptically nostalgic tale about crust-punks in 1970s New York City. As soon as I finished it, I bought the second book.
	The Vision, Volume 1 by Tom King, Jordie Bellaire and Gabriel Hernandez Walta. Marvel is doing some of its best work with second-tier characters like Hawkeye, Howard the Duck and now The Vision. In this series, The Vision builds a family for himself and tries to live a “normal life” in suburbia. Things go tragically, horribly wrong almost immediately, and the book traces The Vision’s slow but inevitable downfall while discussing heady topics like existential questions about the true nature of humanity.
	Vox by Nicholson Baker. Vox has a simple (now quaint) conceit: a wide-ranging phone conversation between two people on a phone sex line. Although their conversation does occasionally get steamy, the book is more about the real human connection between two strangers who are nothing but voices on a line. By the end of the book, both characters feel incredibly sharply drawn thanks to the glimpses Baker gives us into their innermost private thoughts.
	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. A family saga with a twist, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is quietly devastating, but it’s also funny and strange and next door to the unreal. Reading it made me misty-eyed more than once, and I always consider that a point in favor of a book. I absolutely loved it.